Recent Entries

The Perils of Creativity

A comment on the Syconium arc of Nature of Nature's Art. CW: That arc deals with the topic of sexuality.

Hi Zack (and others). I feel like you've responded to an error of others with an error of your own. I'm not currently in a manic episode, I think, so hopefully this time I won't be hurtful or deranged in my comment.

I sincerely believe that NofNA has the capacity to be great art, and one of the attributes of great art is that it is larger than the intent of its creator. You express frustration that people are criticizing a story other than the one you are endeavoring to tell, and stating that it fails at goals it does not even have. But a great story tells many stories at once. While one of the stories within Syconium may be a powerful study of a primal force, another one may be a deficient sociological critique of sex work. My own personal version of the story seems so far removed from your intent that it's startling whenever you express that intent.

Personally, I read Syconium as a story about the perils of creativity, specifically the perils about making creativity a personal, intimate act. Art has a transformative power, and some artists, like our heroine, apply this power to transform themselves and their own lives. From this come a fragmentation of the self; a difficulty in expressing oneself fully, except via that art; an inability to view social relations normally, with a resultant vulnerability to abusive relationships; despair and frustration at not being understood, and worse, at not even being taken seriously. One of the recurrent criticisms of Syconium is Smoothie's dominance in presenting his ideas. I take the heroine's silence in these scenes to indicate a desperation to be understood, so that even a regard as biased and academic as Smoothie's is far more appealing and nourishing than that of all the others who don't even try to understand her. In my version of the story Syconium, sex is present because the intimacy of sex serves as a figure for the deep, close relationship people can have with works of art.

The point of the above is that it's entirely valid (and worthwhile, if done civilly) to critique the story you read, even if it's not the story the creator himself reads. And it looks like enough people have been reading the deficient sociological version of Syconium to establish its existence alongside other Syconiums. Perhaps you yourself will come back here one day and be surprised to discover one of its other aspects, and find a story that your readers read before you did.

Generosity

From a discussion on The Digital Antiquarian.

For some reason I felt the urge to write an essay here. Well, I can put it up on my Dreamwidth account later.

One of the biggest gulfs between the early days of both console and computer games, and their mature contemporary state, is in what it means for a game to respect its player and its player’s time.

In the early days, a respectful game was above all a generous game, one in which you could lose yourself for days or weeks in what was, at the time, an expensive investment. Think of the hours spent wandering Zork: most of those hours are not fruitful, but you’re still rewarded by its very sense of place.

For some console games, the action-oriented ones, this generosity expressed itself as gameplay whose required skills were a joy to learn, paired with escalating challenges to test those skills. For console RPGs, however, the generosity expressed itself simply by rewarding investment with progress. If this seems too obvious to credit, that’s because you’re on the far side of the gulf.

The good games paced their rewards superbly. In particular, I think of the best of the early Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games, where merely fighting the monsters you saw while walking from destination to destination would make the boss fights challenging but surmountable. (In contrast, the bad JRPGs would require you to halt and grind repeatedly.) That mechanic, however, became a problem as technology developed. Early on, requiring you to level on numerous random encounters was the only way a console RPG could be long, generous in that regard. Data on cartridges was scarce; Dragon Warrior 4, a grand story with unmatched emotional impact (for the NES) and a tragic villain, took up 256kB. Soon enough, however, random encounters became a contrivance, and the RPGs went from long to bloated.

Personally, I still place Final Fantasy 7 on the side of being respectful, but there are factors no longer at play. One of the factors is its sheer spectacle, the game being unmatched in the quality of its animations. These no longer impress, but back then summoning one of the Bahamuts was a joy every time. (Its sequel, among its many other problems, placed too much priority on spectacle. The lengths of its summon animations were widely mocked.) However, with CDs on the scene, the technological need for random encounters as a way to lengthen a game was no longer there. It had become a trope, sometimes executed well, sometimes poorly, and its artifice would only become more apparent as time went on.

To return to the earlier point. The gulf exists because it became possible for something resembling this aforementioned generosity to be manufactured. For the larger companies, making a game long was a solved problem, a matter of effective management of large teams. Likewise, such games were full of rewards, and generous in that limited sense. But they were no longer respectful; some, like the Assassin’s Creed, were downright condescending in how little their rewards meant. Early on, you could love a game because it gave you forty hours’ worth of story and gameplay, in a time when few other games did. Now, no-one could love a game simply for being long.

What does it mean now for a game to be respectful of its players? I don’t know; I don’t have a general answer. Dark Souls is respectful, but in a profoundly different way than Super Mario Odyssey is respectful. I do, however, think that the emphasis on time remains: a respectful game is a game that respects its player’s time.

One more thing before I wrap up this silliness. Final Fantasy VII’s oft-derided huge-handed character models exist because, in the at-the-time undeveloped field of model animation, Square took inspiration from marionetting: outside of its combats, its characters are animated like puppets. This is not only an animation technique; it also becomes an explicit theme of the game. Even decades on, I don’t want to spoil you, so I’ll just say this: when you find Aeris again, take the scene very slowly. There’s something very interesting that happens before the part everyone remembers.

Matt: Interesting mini-essay Lhexa. Of course, seems to me like its worth noting that all this is also a function of not necessarily an idealized player free of context that stays the same across eras, but what we (or rather the game’s producers and planners) expect that player’s other life commitments and their alternative options to be. For a early teen child in the early era, without Youtube/TikTok, without internet, it’s perhaps different from what many of a typical player would be today. And so this changes over time, with the technological landscape, how more entertainment becomes cheaply available, and so the “opportunity cost” of playing more hours in a game (i.e. what else could you be doing instead?), and also the expected age range and lifestyle of players.

It’s quite a challenge in particular to reconcile the ideals of “openness” and “freedom”, which is that you can go anywhere you can see, do anything and make choices about everything – and which older players tend to expect more of – with managing to ensure that this time always includes something fun or exciting – naturally much easier to ensure in more linear and “directed” games. This leads to the sort of contemporary complaints about games that superficially seem large and open, but on closer inspection are found to have most of that large world simply be merely shepherding players between map markers that ask them to fetch and deliver miscellaneous items and spent a lot of time walking or using fast travel via menus. (Hideo Kojima’s ‘Death Stranding’ could be viewed as a veteran designer’s slightly sly “Well, OK guys, if this is what you really want” parody of this, as well as in earnest a modern high budget game).

Thanks for the response, Matt. Looking back on it, my essay’s historical argument is too simplistic to endorse, but it least I was able to develop my ideas of “respect” and “generosity” in gaming a bit further.

I agree that there’s no idealized player that we can appeal to, and that’s a large part of why the value of early games like Final Fantasy VII requires extra effort to perceive nowadays. One thing that intrigues me is the possibility of further paradigm shifts in gaming; in fact, we seem to be in the midst of one now, with the concept of “games as services” emerging from the domain of MMOs to cover many other genres. I’m accustomed to thinking of games as discrete experiences, like books or movies, but there’s now quite a few people for whom (individual!) games are more like lifestyles.

Openness was revolutionary when it when first appeared in the console space, but in retrospect it was more of a technological innovation than a design innovation. Kinda like how Quake’s primary innovation was technology more than design, revolutionary though it felt at the time. As for freedom, the player can only do what the designers allow them to do, so freedom is a matter of designers not turning around and constraining what abilities previously they granted (for instance by having varied movement options but then placing lots of invisible walls), rather than granting them a large number of abilities in the first place. I’m not going anywhere with this, just rambling.

De Astra

Jokes Astra made at TFF, posted with permission.

Slugcat? Or squisher fisher?

Ah yes, the two genders, swimsuit and camisole.

Straight people already have their Pride Month. It's called Christmas.

In Dallas, you always feel seen.

Welp, time to bring out the pistol

Google has just informed me that it now requires two-factor authentication. Time to pull the trigger and shoot my Google account in the head. It'll be quite a hassle to migrate everything over to Proton, but at least I'm paid up.

In Shadowrun terms, I'm burning my SIN.

Botticelli and Dürer

An essay from my art history class several semesters ago. Mainly I'm proud of proving Vasari wrong.

There are many points of comparison between Botticelli and Dürer. Both started out as goldsmith’s apprentices before switching to a new apprenticeship in painting (Arasse pg. 21). Both were deeply religious, but their work nonetheless incorporated new topics not traditionally religious. Both had mid-career interruptions in which they worked on grandiose projects in a seat of power, the Sistine Chapel for Botticelli and the Paper Triumphal Arch for Dürer. Both turned to quixotic personal projects late in their career. Most interestingly to me, both lived in nations shaken by charismatic religious reformers, Savonarola in Florence and Luther in the Holy Roman Empire. As such, these two artists provide good touchstones for discussing the similarities and differences between the Italian and Northern Renaissance.

Botticelli was a master of traditional Italo-Byzantine topics, most significantly the Madonna, a subject he reprised many times. He also mastered the planar narrative compositions in vogue toward the end of the fifteenth century, in which multiple parts of the same story occur across the foreground plane; for instance, his Moses panels in the Sistine Chapel possess a narrative coherence not shared by the other panels of this phase of the project. His forms emphasize contour and line over volume, to the extent that individual figures pop out of his paintings. His figures were highly naturalistic by the standards of his time, although noticeably attenuated. Botticelli also developed his own distinctive variant on the Renaissance contrapposto, with the supporting leg at an angle and the other leg’s knee almost covering its counterpart, most famously seen in his Birth of Venus. This painting also shows his characteristic swaying, flowing figures, which always seem to be in motion or even on the verge of falling.

Many of these characteristics are drawn from the Italian Renaissance; however, unlike artists like Masaccio, who seem to fall naturally between the Italo-Byzantine and the High Renaissance, Botticelli took the innovations of the Renaissance in an idiosyncratic direction. The naturalistic contrapposto is a classic Renaissance pose, but other Renaissance artists’ figures in that stance don’t seem on the verge of falling. Botticelli understands linear perspective, as can be seen in his 1481 Annunciation, but it does not serve as the organizing principle of a composition like in Perugino’s The Delivery of the Keys or Raphael’s The School of Athens. Botticelli knew how to use a landscape’s colors and landmarks to enhance a composition, but he was uninterested in realistic landscape, a fact for which Leonardo criticized him (Kroegel pg. 57); this indifference can be seen very plainly in the Birth’s odd V-shaped waves. Botticelli’s biggest departure was his emphasis on line and contour, a decade before High Renaissance thinking declared that individual lines should never be seen in final compositions.

Botticelli studied under Filippo Lippi, whose Madonna and Child could be mistaken for one of Botticelli’s. He was influenced by Verrocchio and Pollaiuolo (Legouix p. 5-6), whose Battle of the Ten Naked Men has swaying, outlined figures much like Botticelli’s. He drew intellectual inspiration from Alberti’s book De Pictura: The Birth’s flowing hair and billowing garments closely follow Alberti’s advice (Alberti p. 67), down to the inclusion of Zephyr as wind source. Demonstrating the importance of patronage in the Italian Renaissance, Botticelli was favored by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who commissioned the Birth and Primavera along the Neo-Platonist reasoning provided by his court philosopher Marsilio Ficino (Dempsey pg. 27). Such was Botticelli’s fame that he was conscripted to work on the Sistine Chapel by Pope Sixtus IV, but his output changed dramatically after the death of his patron Lorenzo and the rise of the Dominican preacher Savonarola.

Vasari falsely claimed of Botticelli that “..he was so ardent a [Savonarola] partisan that he was thereby induced to desert his painting, and, having no income to live on, fell into very great distress.” (Vasari Vol. III pg. 251) This is contradicted by the fact that in 1503, well after the preacher’s death, Botticelli was consulted along with a council of 27 other respected Florentines about the placement of Michelangelo’s David (Janson pg. 631-2). Nor did Botticelli abandon classical (and Neo-Platonic) subjects, condemned by Savonarola (Janson pg. 630): the 1497 Calumny of Apelles[1] includes characters representing Calumny, Slander, Ignorance and Suspicion (Dempsey pg. 35), and 1500-1501 saw him visiting the classical stories of Lucretia and Virginia. While Botticelli did support Savonarola (Strinati pg. 80), his artistic development after Lorenzo’s death focused on his personal religious convictions over commercial concerns, convictions whose fervor Vasari may have conflated with Savonarola’s. Botticelli completed a decade-long personal project, a set of dozens of ink illustrations of Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. Meanwhile, his late religious paintings are typified by his 1500 Mystic Nativity, whose increased artifice recalls the Italo-Byzantine tradition. Botticelli’s attenuated figures did inspire the Mannerist artists Pontormo and Bronzino (Arasse pg. 22), but Botticelli’s artistic values, and his later explorations of religion and art, were at odds with High Renaissance thought. Thus, he fell into centuries of obscurity before being rediscovered by the pre-Raphaelites.

The same cannot be said of Dürer, whose fame endured after his death. Dürer mastered the naturalism demanded by the Renaissance, and spread his work far and wide through his many woodcut prints and engravings. This medium, the successor of manuscript illumination, was an innovation of the Northern Renaissance. Dürer’s prints possess the emotion of the Housebook Master and the detail and naturalism of Schongauer. His compositions are dynamic and complex, making heavy use of allegory and symbolism. Some of their subjects were conventional, like The Large Passion series of prints, and some new, like the Apocalypse series. Dürer was also an early adopter of watercolor, and his watercolor sketches The Great Piece of Turf and The Young Hare remain famous even though they are mere studies. His attention to detail and texture, excellently demonstrated by The Great Piece of Turf, is an inheritance of previous Northern Renaissance masters like van Eyck.

Dürer thoroughly learned the Northern Renaissance lessons in detail and printing from his painting master Wolgemut, who also produced prints (Russell pg. 54). Dürer was also the first Northern Renaissance artist to thoroughly absorb the lessons of the Italian Renaissance, thanks to his early voyage to Venice. There he learned under Bellini (Russell pg. 61) and was exposed to Giorgione and Titian. Dürer displays a full mastery of linear perspective (e.g. in his print St. Gerome in his Studio), and his sketches and fragmentary manuscripts exhibit a preoccupation with ideal human proportions (Russell pg. 161) that recalls Leonardo. After his prints brought him fame, Dürer was, like Botticelli, conscripted to work on a grandiose project: Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian’s Triumphal Arch, a series of 195 woodblock prints glorifying the Emperor that could be assembled into an enormous paper arch. It proved symbolic of Maximilian, whose grandeur existed only on paper.

Dürer was an early innovator in several artforms that came into prominence after his death. Dürer produced portraits, but they contained an element of idealization that kept them from matching Holbein’s in quality; this is apparent when one compares Dürer’s portrait of Erasmus with the one by Holbein. Dürer enthusiastically sketched landscapes (in both silverpoint and watercolor) long before they became a subject in their own right. However, his landscapes did not go beyond sketches, and he thus yields to Altdorfer the title of the first great landscape artist. Dürer also produced fantastic still-lives, like the aforementioned Great Piece of Turf, which anticipates later artists like Aertsen and De Heem, but again these remained studies. Still, one should not be too dismissive of studies, for Dürer’s Praying Hands (a study for a lost altarpiece) has become an enduring image of piety.

This is not by chance, for Dürer was indeed a pious man. Many of his great print series draw on religious topics, which in some ways prefigure the Reformation; for instance, The Four Horsemen includes a bishop being devoured. Dürer was an early and passionate supporter of Luther[2]. Dürer’s late masterpiece The Four Apostles may be read as a pro-Reformation manifesto. Apostle Peter, the supposed first pope, anxiously consults the Gospel held by John. This echoes the Protestant claim that divine authority resides wholly in the Bible, as opposed to the Church. Paul, holding one of his epistles, looks beyond the combined space of the painting and viewer, reflecting his role as Apostle to the Gentiles (i.e. to outsiders). Finally, Mark holds both a Bible and a sword. This represents the concept of “militant Christianity,” which states that faith is a life-or-death struggle even when one lives in a Christian nation. Glancing almost angrily at the viewer, Mark asks us whether we are willing to take up both book and sword in service of our faith. As radical as The Four Apostles is, Dürer did not seem to regard Lutheran thinking as something that required a schism with Catholicism. The painting’s St. Peter still carries the key symbolizing his authority, and Dürer continued to attend Catholic mass in nominally Lutheran Nuremberg. Dürer never did meet Luther as he desired (Roffo pg. 28), but upon the artist’s death, Luther wrote (Russell pg. 161), “It is indeed the duty of pious men to mourn for Dürer.”

Savonarola and Luther were dissimilar. Savonarola was an aggressive iconoclast (Janson pg. 630), while Luther was a nuanced theologian (Janson pg. 638 gives his neutral opinion towards icons). Botticelli and Dürer, while they have many points of comparison as illustrated above, were also dissimilar in many ways. Botticelli was provincial, living entirely in Florence except for his work in Rome, while Dürer traveled twice to Venice, then to Augsburg, then to various cities in the Netherlands. Botticelli never adopted oil painting, working exclusively with tempera, while Dürer not only used oil painting, but also the even newer medium of watercolor. While both devoted their later years to personal projects, Botticelli’s were archaic paintings meant to appeal to himself alone, while Dürer wrote various manuscripts meant to instruct many. Finally, Botticelli’s work, while beautiful, proved uninfluential in the next few centuries, while Dürer became widely influential. The dissimilarities are as numerous as the similarities, which to my mind serves as a reminder not to take one artist as sole representative of an entire period.

[1] Apelles was a famous Hellenistic painter. Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus recreates a lost Apelles work. This Hellenistic Venus Anadyomene was described by Pliny the Elder and then versified by the Florentine poet Politian in 1479 (Dempsey pg. 25); Botticelli’s Venus echoes Politian’s. Thus Apelles’ lost Venus eventually inspired its own replacement.
[2] Dürer wrote to the Elector Frederick the Wise’s secretary pleading for him to take Luther under his protection, “for the sake of Christianity.” (Russell pg. 129) Indeed, the Elector sheltered Luther after the Diet of Worms.

• Alberti, Leon Battista. De Pictura. Translated by Rocco Sinisgalli. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Arasse, Daniel. “Botticelli’s Manner.” In Botticelli, edited by Patrizia Nitti. Skira Editore S.P.A., 2003.
• Dempsey, Charles. “Love and the Figure of the Nymph in Botticelli’s Art.” In Botticelli, edited by Patrizia Nitti. Skira Editore S.P.A., 2003.
• Janson, H. W., and Janson, Anthony F. History of Art Vol. II. 5th ed. Prentice Hall, 1997.
• Kroegel, Alessandra Galizzi. “The Figure of Mary in Botticelli’s Art.” In Botticelli, edited by Patrizia Nitti. Skira Editore S.P.A., 2003.
• Legouix, Susan. Botticelli. Oresko Books, 1977.
• Roffo, Stefano. Dürer. Gramercy Books, 1994.
• Russell, Francis. The World of Dürer. Time-Life Books, 1981.
• Strinati, Claudio. “The Real Botticelli.” In Botticelli, edited by Patrizia Nitti. Skira Editore S.P.A., 2003.
• Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol III. Translated by Gaston de Vere. Project Gutenberg. Accessed Feb. 27, 2022. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26860/26860-h/26860-h.htm

Rain World

A review I posted in various places.

I am in love with Rain World. I haven't felt this way about a game since Dark Souls. Time to proselytize.

Rain World is a survival game with physics-based platforming, set in a richly simulated post-civilization ecosystem. You play as a "slugcat," basically a sentient tool-using pine marten in the middle of the food chain. Each cycle gives you a short period of time (about ten to fifteen minutes) to forage and explore before the crushing rain starts to pour. You start and end cycles in shelters evenly spaced across the automapped levels, whose maps are retained even after death. Hibernation requires three (on easy) or four (on normal) food items. Your basic food sources are hanging fruit and delicious bats, whose location you can roughly sense on the automap. There are many more food sources, each requiring some deduction or intuition on your part. A plethora of predators stand in your way, whose behavior is finely simulated. You can at times feel the frustration or anger of a thwarted predator. The lizards feel suitably lacertilian, the vultures suitably avian, the insects suitably insectoid, and the godawful monstrosities suitably godawful.

The platforming is astonishingly fun for a game whose jump height is no taller than its character. The jump (there are two kinds, distinguished by horizontal speed) mainly provides horizontal mobility, while vertical movement is best achieved by climbing. You quickly reach the point where you can reliably gauge your jumps. The gorgeous levels, each individually drawn, nonetheless have consistent units of dimension, allowing you to gauge the possibilities; for instance, you can crawl up through one-unit-wide spaces, and wall-jump up two- or three-unit ones. Building on these basics are an absurd number of advanced techniques; only yesterday, after some sixty hours of play, did I realize that I can kick off corners in tunnels for a substantial speed boost. Many of these advanced techniques involve your tools, which can be carried two at a time. The basic ones are bits of rubble (good for distraction or stunning an enemy) and rebar spears, good for attacking or creating impromptu platforms. The combat involving these spears has such a high skill ceiling that I still feel like I'm only middling at it. Then there are all sorts of situational items, like a small grub that can either be eaten or thrown into open spaces to attract its monstrous vulture parents. I'm still figuring out new uses and interactions for objects, dozens of hours in.

The ecosystem doesn't revolve around you. Other critters share your taste for bats, and may harass you if you compete with them. A small insect carrying eggs on its back is a welcome sight, being a complete meal on its own, but lizards also savor these. The same lizards that plague you are easy prey to vultures, and if a creature is in your way, waiting for some kind of systemic interaction between it and a newcomer is usually a better option than fighting. However, such a creature will rarely block your path entirely, because the maps are designed with multiple routes, both on the level of individual screens and on the macroscopic level. Broadly speaking, cycles become safer later on, as some predators are killed and others retire, well-fed, to their dens. If nothing else, everything flees to shelter when the rain approaches, giving you a minute of unhindered travel. To emphasize how much freedom there is even on a large scale, to reach the first major objective, a player might descend into the drainage system, emerge in vast garbage dump, then traverse a shoreline crowded with derelict machinery. On the other hand, that player might ascend to a industrial area, from there find a shadowy ruin, and struggle their way through to find themself at the end of the shoreline area. (These are not the only options!) All of these areas are gorgeous, each individually drawn room enhanced with various lighting effects.

The setting is post-humanity, but not, strictly speaking, post-apocalyptic. Rather, a hyper-advanced species converted every last bit of land to industrial, agricultural or residential use, before gradually dwindling away in pursuit of transcendence. The game is a masterclass in environmental storytelling. The original game featured three characters (corresponding to difficulty levels), each with its own individual story, and the expansion adds five more. The game's biggest downside is its high difficulty, but to go along with this there is a high skill ceiling. My first game was a relentless struggle, where every new shelter reached was an accomplishment. After beating the game once and starting anew to undo a decision I regretted, I found food plentiful and the foes surmountable. Then I tried the higher difficulty character and was right back in the struggle.

By God this game is good. It took force of will not to go back to playing it while I wrote this.

Dragon Warrior

From a set of comments on the CRPG Addict blog. Footnotes are later additions.

Here's more. The map of the first Dragon Warrior is the second most thoughtful one I know of its size and format, the most thoughtful being Ultima IV's. A list of some of its thoughtful touches:

Southwest of the start is a strip of land belonging to higher-difficulty monsters. This is intentional: if you look at the area across the mountains, that zone is of a much lower difficulty than the others by it. It's a little grinding spot near the start, discoverable by chance.
The Rimuldar tunnel cannot be seen from the edge of the swamp you must cross to reach it. As a child, I did not know the tunnel existed until I explored the eastern coast, and saw it across the mountains.
Throughout the map, zones four or more steps higher (in monster difficulty) are visible from across mountain ranges or water tiles. Often there are intriguing features visible, like the Mountain Cave (west of the start) or the canyon maze.
As a child, the canyon maze dismayed me in its pointlessness. Now, I know its purpose. Cantlin (the final, fortress town) has two approaches. The hard one goes through the canyon maze, teasing you with a maze that loops around Cantlin. The easy one starts at the far southwest region of the map. However, the hard one is also the natural one to attempt first. Thus, the easy path is a reward for those who explore for the sake of exploration, rather than trying to beeline to the next place.
Both deserts have oases. The ruins of Hauksness were built over one (as revealed in a later game), and a later game cutely posits that the northeastern desert's oasis shelters a small bandit town.
The resemblance to Britannia is a deliberate homage. Horii names the Wizardry and Ultima series as the first game's biggest influences, strange though that may appear given Dragon Warrior's simplicity.
The starting areas provide you with curving grassland paths between the first few cities. These tiles have the lowest encounter rate. Indeed, patches of another grassland path extend to Hauksness. This is an elegant way to suggest roads, without investing in the large number of tiles needed for those to look decent on an overworld map.
The concealed, wooded northern canyon, a simple and obvious trick to an adult, delighted me as a child.
The settings characterize the towns before you even enter them. Garinham (northwest) is a mercantile port town, Kol (northeast) a woodland haven, Rimuldar (southeast) a nigh-Arthurian magical city on the lake, Cantlin (southwest) a fortress concealed deep in the mountains.
Your first look at the overland map shows you its three most important locations.
The exploration and advancement is terribly paced for a player of any sophistication, but it is perfect for a newcomer to RPGs. It was my first RPG (remember, too poor for anything better), and I maxed my level before reaching the Dragonlord's castle. If you do so, the king tells you, "Shouldn't you have defeated the Dragonlord by now?"

In my book, Dragon Warrior is the single most elegant RPG there is (though nowhere near the best), because my idea of "elegance" measures how much you can do within tight constraints [4]. That's why I put myself through the ordeal of a speedrun.

This elegance carries to the Japanese (not English) text. Later, Horii also showed himself adept at characterization using minimal text. The game design is also elegant, though tedious to an experienced player. Level 2 can barely be reached before your first inn visit, Level 3 before your second, Level 4 before your third.

...Before you chide me again for putting lots of effort into comments, I'm saving them for use in a later essay. :P

I certainly wouldn't chide someone for putting a lot of effort into a comment when I put a lot of effort into the original reviews. I mean, we could both chide ourselves for spending so much mental energy on ephemera, but it would be hypocritical to do it to each other.

I appreciate the way that you regard the game. I just suspect that if you held up any game world to this level of analysis, you would find an equal number of impressive items. I'm happy that there are such dedicated fans for just about every game, no matter how I feel about those games, because they offer comments like yours and highlight things I might have missed or under-emphasized in my single run.

I have held up many game worlds to close analysis. Off the top of my head, only Ultimas III and IV and Pool of Radiance approach this level of thoughtfulness, in this era of gaming. [1] Of course, they have much richer and denser maps, because their engines allowed for many more options. Wizardry is great, but its level design is often thoughtless and haphazard. Final Fantasy is grand, but the care is unevenly distributed. (For instance, it has a legendary variety of bugs that could have been easily discovered with systematic testing, but nobody dared to question Nasir.)

All the above examples are less elegant, because their constraints are looser (though still very tight by later standards). If you know much about programming and game design, you'll be amazed by how constrained and, frankly, behind the times the NES was. For instance, it had an 8-bit processor, when at the time of Dragon Warrior IV personal computing was transitioning to 32 bits. Dragon Warrior is even more constrained than most NES games: its cart uses the literal minimum amount of ROM that can be supplied in an NES cart. Dragon Warrior IV, meanwhile, has the largest ROM ever seen on the NES in the United States, an astounding two hundred and fifty six kilobytes! [2] When I studied Dragon Warrior's systems for my speedrun I was impressed by the programming talent they displayed. It used optimization techniques from the minicomputer era that had already become unnecessary by the eighties. Ultimately, Dragon Warrior's elegance is the reason why speedrunners have managed to push its world record down to 25 minutes. A thirty-minute Dragon Warrior run was demonstrated live at AGDQ (a speedrunning charity marathon) a few years ago.

I guess I'm allowed to brag. My speedrun is on Speed Demos Archive. The record stood for about two years. Technically it's still the no-RNG-manipulation world record, but no-one plays segmented speedruns anymore, so the comparison to single-segment ones is misleading.

The Dragon Quest series rarely receives its due in the US because critics here are largely unequipped to analyze shonen games, which is to say, games designed for teenagers. [3] Most US game critics won't even give children's games their due, must less those meant for adolescents. Meanwhile, Dragon Warrior has the double sin of being a shonen game aimed at newcomers to RPGs. In its time, its target demographic (teenagers new to RPGs) was every poor kid in the US, since we sure as hell wouldn't have a computer. So overt was this targeting that the game was given away for free with a Nintendo Power magazine subscription.

The first Dragon Warrior is one of the cheapest NES carts to find nowadays, Dragon Warrior IV one of the most expensive. This year, despite my lack of income, I gave myself permission to buy myself a lovely gift: Dragon Warrior IV, costing around $130. I had dreamed of owning it as a child, but could only afford to rent it through Blockbuster, and until this year I have been too mature to spend the money. ;)

Right now my mental health is too poor for physics, so I'm devoting intellectual effort to literary criticism instead, mainly games but also books and comics. This has been a lovely opportunity to add new raw material to the essay I'm compiling. :)

[1] Rather than era, I should have said level of technology. The NES' capabilities are on par with the Apple II, but the console arrived half a decade later.
[2] Both claims are incorrect. The smallest western ROMs include Donkey Kong at 16kB, and the largest is Kirby's Adventure at 512kB. Dragon Warrior weighs in at 32 kB, Dragon Warrior IV at 256 kB.
[3] This definition of shonen is all sorts of inadequate. To start, shonen is a gendered category, with the female equivalent being shojo. Still, the categories in Japan are far better than the US, with its excessively broad "young adult fiction" category.
[4] I now give this title to Roadwarden.

Review: Restless Town

Restless Town is a collection of furry short stories by Madison Scott-Clary. Disclaimer: I support her on Patreon.

Scott-Clary writes with delicacy and understanding, drawing on both personal experience and the experience of others. The stories, populated by kind people, explore anxiety, grief, compulsion, despair and renewal. They survey a period of life when youth is gone and true maturity not yet attained, a period particularly vulnerable to despair. Here despair loses.

Amateur writing lacks sufficient boundary between characters and author. This isn't a matter of self-absorption so much as it is inexperience on the author's part when situating themself among their characters. Scott-Clary grants her characters an autonomy that many famous authors cannot, enabling these characters to take up a presence in the reader's mind.

Scattered thoughts on most of the individual stories.

A Theory of Attachment: A woman suffering from anxiety and compulsion negotiates the introduction of a new companion into an existing relationship, with both romantic and sexual ramifications. She is depicted with empathy: the story does not focus on the compulsions in preference to the compelled, which depictions of OCD tend to do. I feel I am an incrementally more empathetic person for having read this.

Centerpiece: Skipped due to squick.

Overclassification: A folklorist becomes the protagonist of a story that really should have a number.

You're Gone: A husband grieves for his lost wife by continuing to text in their private chat. Developments are communicated with economy, and a premise that could have been self-indulgent is instead an effective vehicle for the story. Mainly I'm happy that epistolary stories are still a thing.

The Fool: I disliked this story for two personal reasons: a general distaste for Tarot, and a dislike for the noncommittal, redirecting style of therapy used by the Tarot reader.

What Defines Us: An email exchange leads to revelations about past trauma. This story sounds drawn from personal experience. There is catharsis here, but it faces away from the reader. (That is not a bad thing.)

Disappearance: The fantasy of torching one's life and starting anew is often a sublimated suicide fantasy. This fantasy gives Sawtooth a tone of an afterlife, complete with understated angelic figures to offer employment and meaning, and an old friend transfigured.

(no subject)

A comment on Syconium, an arc of the webcomic Nature of Nature's Art. Content warning: that particular arc abounds with (non-pornographic) sexual content, of such variety that I can't give a more specific warning.

When I was young, I thought I would be the one with fans, and that I would struggle to treat them with patience, firmness and understanding without hiding from them or exploiting them as most famous creators do. But no, it turns out it's the other way around. I'm the fan, and my task (outside physics) is to provide intellectual support for others.

When following this story, I and many others experienced it as a series of thesis statements, each sophisticated enough to supplant the previous one, but each newly sinister in its own way. Thus I regarded the graduate student's thesis with particular excitement, for here was a compassionate, intelligent, academic, but nonetheless subtly rotten thesis. Surely it was the next to last -- surely it could not be the last, if only because it was presented by an outside savior figure, because it had not been presented by the protagonist herself. But then, in his disastrous attempt to explain himself, Braun admitted that this was his thesis too, disappointing many of us. However, I've come to think that Egress did, in fact, present a new thesis, sufficient to supplant and overpaint the graduate student's. The problem for us as readers, and Braun as a writer, is that Egress' thesis is wholly visual, where we were yearning, and remain yearning, for one that can be expressed in words.

To guide my future work in the comments of this story, I'll leave a slogan. *grins* Ditch the author, date the text.

Foundation

From a comment on Madison Scott-Clary's Patreon account.

I read Asimov's Foundation in graduate school and found it awful. There was a scene that sticks with me in which one professor tells another to calculate the future of humanity based on such and such assumptions, and the other one pulls out a pocket calculator and does so in the space of a paragraph.

Foundation was an unholy combination of Marxism and Great Man theory. It was Marxist in that it claimed humanity passes through a deterministic series of historical phases, each defined by conflict between certain classes. Then it also claimed that each such phase ended with a (calculable) fulcrum requiring a Great Man to resolve correctly.

The only good thing I'm inclined to say about Foundation is that it was (I think) the first novel to portray scientists as heroes.

Deontology versus Utilitarianism

From a discussion on the CRPG Addict Patreon.

I view deontology and utilitarianism (and virtue) as aspects of ethics, not just competing systems. Deontology is the part of ethics that's universal, utilitarianism is the part that's situational, and virtue is the part that's personal. Virtue ethics is particularly important for disempowered people, who are less likely to face the dilemmas that the other systems address.

With Mass Effect 2, it sounds like the burdensome but common problem where giving the player some amount of agency highlights the agency that they still lack. A story with no choices will feel less limiting than a story with binary or arbitrary choices. If you've got a spare corner of free time for an indie game, Disco Elysium does a fantastic job of giving a wide array of choices, aided by the fact that its main character is very much not a blank slate.

Tristan Gall: I’d say that whenever the rules approach works best, the results approach adopts it. Thus, the utilitarian might think there is no such thing as a ‘right’ but still be all for the idea of teaching kids about human rights.

I think all three approaches can yield a complete ethics on their own ("complete" in the sense that following it is enough to make you a good person), but that each one runs into distinct difficulties. Here are three advantages deontology has over utilitarianism.

First, large-scale utilitarianism ends up relying on arguments about human psychology that aren't empirically grounded. I happen to believe humanity benefits the most when all are accorded full and equal rights, but I do not think this has been established empirically. This is a more acute version of the problem that utilitarianism requires you to choose outcomes that you predict to be most beneficial, but the chaos of human behavior renders such prediction very difficult.

Second, an ethical system must not just be applicable in theory but in practice: it should be helpful in the ethical dilemmas that people actually face. Here utilitarianism has the problem that, while it requires one to weigh the outcomes of various possible choices, in many situations these possibilities are effectively unlimited. Most ethical problems are not trolley problems. Even a simple choice (say, lie or don't lie) subdivides into a larger number of options (lie in an emotionally manipulative way, lie in such a way that minimizes the number of falsehoods said, say the truth in a way that you know will mislead, refuse to answer, say the truth but refuse to elaborate, give all desired information even when you know it will hurt). In practical situations, you may have very little time to decide. A deontological rule will deem an entire subset of options off the table, allowing you to use your limited time and energy to subdivide the fewer options that still remain and choose between them on utilitarian grounds. Even when the rule is not strict, it will often still be stated on deontological grounds. For instance, my rule is not to lie to human beings, while lying to computers or websites is fine.

Third, utilitarians will, like everyone else, sometimes face the dilemma of whether to prioritize their own benefit or benefit to another. An Objectivist can argue that always prioritizing oneself ultimately brings the most benefit to everyone, but I don't believe that. Rather, I think that my happiness is the same as your happiness. And that assertion is deontological, because it is a universal assertion in ethics that does not permit situational considerations. There aren't specific situations in which my happiness will be worth more or less than yours, although there will be situations where I can impact one more than another. So, just like deontological ethics can generally be justified on utilitarian grounds, even pure utilitarianism will contain a nugget of deontology, in the truth that benefit to one person is the same as benefit to another.

This was an excuse to pontificate. Don't worry if you feel no desire to engage. ^^

Tristan Gall: I welcome pontificating :)

I think whatever ethics algorithm you pick, you'll be bound by the usual limitations of imperfect information, time constraints and the rest. I think we're stuck relying on 'rules of thumb' no matter which approach we take. eg I think 'First, do no harm' is a useful default position for utilitarians. Why? because I think the optimal outcome is usually cooperative, rather than competitive and I think that maxim starts things off in the right direction.

Franz Marc's The Bewitched Mill

A formal analysis assignment for the art history course I'm taking this semester.

Franz Marc was a German Expressionist and friend of Kandinsky. He drew inspiration from the Cubist and Futurist schools of art, without falling under their shadow. Instead, Marc became representative of his country’s version of Expressionism, to the extent that the Nazi regime condemned his work as degenerate despite the fact he had died decades prior. Marc’s paintings are mostly animal paintings, and reflect his deep empathy for such creatures, an empathy which he expressed in his various stylistic flourishes.

I intended to write this essay about the endlessly rich Marc masterpiece Fate of the Animals from 1913, but that painting was not available on the Google Arts website. However, as the “Introduction to Art Historical Analysis” tutorial quotes, style is “a coherence of qualities in periods or people.” Such is this coherence that if an artist creates a masterpiece, one can often find points of comparison elsewhere in their work. Indeed, the website furnished the compositionally similar, but thematically contrasting, 1913 oil-on-canvas painting The Bewitched Mill.

The Bewitched Mill is 51” x 36”, vertically oriented, a size which can fill one’s entire field of view at a modest distance. It and Marc’s comparable Fate of the Animals from 1913 are both divided into left and right halves, but The Mill’s vertical orientation allows both to be viewed simultaneously. In contrast, The Fate’s horizontal orientation forces the two halves to be considered separately. This serves their different aims: The Mill depicts on the left a scene of human construction in harmony with nature on the right, while The Fate shows objectification and devastation (right) inflicted on the animals (left).

A large region of flowing water separates the two sides of The Mill, and each side is further divided into thirds; on the left, from top to bottom, a there are a cityscape, a mill wheel, and a waterfront, and on the right, a forest landscape, an abstract clearing, and some animals drinking water. Unlike many of Marc’s paintings, The Mill has both background and foreground that are (at least partly) representational. Nonetheless, these backgrounds emphasize their emotional impact over illusionistic considerations, with the cityscape dissolving into a confusing jumble while the forest side transitions into a recognizable forest with calm, muted tones. Each half alternates between representation and cubist abstraction: the left has its realistic waterwheel couched between cityscape and river water that are suggestive blocks of color, while the right has distinct animals at bottom, then an abstract grassy field of blocky colors, then representational trees and bushes. This draws on Marc’s strengths as both a representational and abstract painter: his knowledge of animal anatomy is superb, as is his ability to abstract that anatomy. Another vivid example of this combination of skills can be seen in his 1913 The Foxes.

Forms in Marc paintings become more chaotic and jumbled the more they pertain to humanity and human endeavor. This can be seen in the fully abstract portions of the Mill: the cityscape is the most chaotic portion, followed by the riverfront with its conflicting angles, followed by the regular, cascading rectangles of the field on the right. Rounded shapes tend to be reserved for animals and their habitats. The two drinking animals at lower right, the trees at upper right, and the birds in the center are the painting’s only organic forms. The waterwheel is the only curved form in the human half, and its spokes and buckets are expressively jagged and sharp. It also provides one of the two dominant lines in the painting, the other being the larger curve of the waterfall tangent to the waterwheel. The larger curve transitions in swirls to the curves of the trees and animals, and the regions of the animal half blend into each other, whereas the regions of the human half are starkly delineated. These two dominant lines suggest Marc’s overall attitude toward the human and animal worlds: they may meet in a momentary harmonious tangent, but they ultimately curve away from one another.

In Marc paintings, saturated and bright colors tend to be reserved for animals, while dark and desaturated areas denote humanity; this is demonstrated plainly in The Fate of the Animals. However, these tend not to be realistic colors; instead, Marc developed a personal color symbolism for various animal traits. This color symbolism was not restricted to the colors most common among actual animals; in The Mill, for example, there is a bright ochre deer and a dark blue boar.

Blue was Marc’s color for powerful animals; in addition to this painting’s boar, his work contains many blue horses (e.g. in the lost 1913 The Tower of Blue Horses, or the 1911 The Little Blue Horses), a stylistic trait so distinctive that it lent its name to the art journal/exhibition Marc co-founded with Kandinsky, The Blue Rider. In this journal, Marc wrote, “Blue is the masculine principle, robust and spiritual. Yellow is the feminine principle, gentle, serene, sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy.” The Mill has all three: the blue (masculine) boar, drinking in peace with a yellow (feminine) doe, across from an imposing and heavy red waterwheel. The Mill’s depiction of harmony between man and nature is reflected in the fact that colors are equally bright and saturated in both its human and animal halves, a departure from many of his other paintings.

Light in Marc paintings, like in many other Expressionist and Cubist paintings, wholly serves the painting’s emotional impact, as opposed to enhancing the illusionism of its depictions. There are no traditional light sources or shadows: the yellow doe at bottom right of The Bewitched Mill, for instance, has a head seemingly lit from upper left and a torso lit from bottom right. The sky itself is a stark red, a color chosen to make the distant city more jarring. The bright white of the waterfall dominates the painting tonally, serving to separate the painting’s halves while also sheltering a few bright birds. This serves the painting’s simultaneous themes of harmony and separation. The color and light balance of the human and animal sides are quite different: the human side transitions abruptly between a few colors clashing in both hue and brightness, while the animal side transitions smoothly between a greater number of more soothing, more harmonious colors.

There tend to be few distinct textures in The Mill or other Marc paintings, color usually appearing in solid blocks or steady gradients. This is not an artistic failing but a deliberate choice: complex textures tend to flatten or merge the shapes on which they appear, while simple, uniform textures emphasize and draw one’s attention to these constituent shapes and patterns. In The Mill, each half of the painting subdivides into regions of alternating abstraction and representation; furthermore, each such subregion has a different overall pattern of shapes. The waterfall has swirls and unbroken lines not seen in the rest of the painting. The three regions that might be called abstract and cubist (top left, lower left, and middle right) are nonetheless distinct in appearance, due to differing constituent shapes and angles. The three representational regions likewise have distinct patterns: animals at lower right whose different body parts are demarcated separately; trees at upper right with elliptic foliage; and the waterwheel divided radially into sharp pieces. Due to their different constituent patterns, each region of The Mill pops out individually when focused upon.

Franz Marc’s version of Expressionism employs a purposeful relationship between parts and whole when depicting animals. The human eye is good at discerning human features: minute differences in eyes, cheek and chin give rise to a countless variety of faces. However, the human eye is not so generous to animal features: one cow or horse will look much like another cow or horse. A Franz Marc animal, like the deer or boar at the lower right of The Mill, will subdivide into many distinct shapes, where a more realistic rendering would shade the parts of the animal into one whole. The abstraction of these components will vary widely, typically with the face rendered most realistically; compare The Foxes and The Little Blue Horses to see how widely Marc’s paintings vary between abstraction and realism. However, the overall effect is always a greatly increased complexity for the animal figure, reaching the complexity that the human eye naturally attributes to human figures. This indicates the unknown complexity of animal existence, suggesting that animals have inner lives as complex as human beings’, though alien in composition.

Terce

Work, rest and play is a holy trinity too.

Prime

Mathematics is as hilarious as it is beautiful.

From CRPG Addict

A comment I left on the CRPG Addict blog.

As another person whose ethical system originated from Ultima, I think I have a new way to look at the difficulties you've faced when it comes to skipping ahead.

You develop your conscience by developing your virtues; and there are such things as intellectual virtues and a conscience of the intellect. Intellectual virtues include such traits as discipline, thoroughness, rigor, and openness. (By the last, I mean being open to criticism and suggestions.) And of those four, "thoroughness" and "openness" certainly characterize the blog; you reviewed Dragon Warrior, of all things.

The conscience, including the intellectual conscience, speaks when conscious reasoning goes astray; and to me it sounds like your intellectual conscience spoke up when it came to time to skip ahead. This might be because skipping was too big a departure from your vision for the blog, or it might be because there was an unnoticed flaw in the method you intended to use.

Say you used random number generation to select the game. This still leaves open the possibility of randomly selecting, say, Fallout, and then you'd face the prospect of "properly" reaching 1996 having already played its best game. But I don't know what method you chose, so I can only speculate.

Anyway. Thanks as always for a venue in which to articulate my thoughts. More than two decades on I remain a proponent of virtue ethics, and you can see why.

Lauds

Today resembles yesterday: years past still cling. I awake as though not yet human into a cold moment, my friends the morning dew on my coat, soon to be shaken off. Telling myself that today I will be less untrue, I slowly prepare stiff limbs for a day of things I will not say. The light now dawning to my eyes gives reminder of how far I have gone afield, and how much ground remains to be covered before I can again deserve rest. An eternity has created the day before me, and the day will create a new eternity. Be they the shine in my fur, my friends will await my return, my next night; but for now I am not for them.